>There's no such thing as a 'crime in the philosophical sense.
If there is no such thing, then nothing is right or wrong, and laws are just obstacles to get around however you can, for as long as you can. That seems a strange principle to propose.
Fair enough.. he just ran a business where other people did the dealing, and he made a profit from the sales. Still pretty clearly a criminal conspiracy, at least on paper.
And when I said there's no such thing as crime in a philosophical sense, I meant that what one believes about the ethics of a law doesn't actually apply to its execution. Ulbricht hasn't been charged with crimes against philosophy, and a belief that drug laws are immoral isn't a legally credible defense.
You can make the argument that what Ulbricht did shouldn't be illegal, but I don't believe it's possible to make a credible argument that running the Silk Road site wasn't actually breaking any laws.
> Fair enough.. he just ran a business where other people did the dealing, and he made a profit from the sales.
Like every seedy motel that caters to hookers.
And yet, no one thinks this is a crime... because renting rooms isn't a crime.
>Ulbricht hasn't been charged with crimes against philosophy
From the looks of it, they're trying to offer evidence of crimes he hasn't been charged with to push a gullible jury towards an unjust verdict. Hell, for all the press release propaganda we've heard about murder-for-hire, where are those charges?
Have you ever known an honest prosecutor to hold off on murder charges for which there is evidence, or to leak it to journalists that someone's a murderer when they won't even bother charging them with such?
This smells.
> You can make the argument that what Ulbricht did shouldn't be illegal,
I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that they can't figure out what to charge him with, and so they're twisting the laws and the trial process to convict him anyway.
>Like every seedy motel that caters to hookers. And yet, no one thinks this is a crime... because renting rooms isn't a crime.
At this point it seems you're being purposely obtuse.
Prostitution is a crime (except in a couple of places) and "catering to hookers" is also a crime when you're renting rooms to prostitutes or their clients specifically to facilitate prostitution, as a business, commonly known as "running a brothel."
But again, you seem to choose to employ metaphors which completely disregard intent.
If you can perform the same action and have it not be a crime, but for your inner thoughts, whereas if you do think those thoughts the action is then a crime, then we're what we're really talking about is thoughtcrime.
Doesn't that bother you slightly?
> as a business, commonly known as "running a brothel."
We're not talking about brothels, but specifically about a sort of motel that you must be familiar with if only hypothetically. They use the floorplan of those shitty 1970s motels, there's no parlor, no madam who points at the girls and tells you to pick out one, and often enough an antagonist relationship between the owners and the hookers.
These are real places, they aren't rare, and trying to shift the conversation to something else earns you no credit for honesty.
Renting rooms to hookers is no crime. Motel clerks aren't deputized by the state to perform law enforcement and even if they were it's the hooker's crimes that are illegal, not the hooker herself. She still has a right to rent a room.
> But again, you seem to choose to employ metaphors
Wasn't a metaphor at all. Are you so dimwitted that you can't tell?
The vast majority of crimes have included mental state elements as well as conduct elements for quite a long time (strict liability crimes -- the only kind that don't include mental state elements -- are a much smaller set.)
Thoughtcrime is not any crime that includes a mental state component, thoughtcrime is a crime that is thought alone (specifically, politically unorthodox thought alone) as a crime.
He was facilitating and taking a cut of the profits from dealing. That was the crime, and it's on the books as a crime.
You might think this is unjust, if you frame laws as just vs. unjust it's much more clear than talking about 'crime in the philosophical sense' which is not a normal way of discussing law.
And as far as this one...
>There's no such thing as a 'crime in the philosophical sense.
If there is no such thing, then nothing is right or wrong, and laws are just obstacles to get around however you can, for as long as you can. That seems a strange principle to propose.